Death as a Way of Life

When Fear Overcomes Everything

March 1996

Israel experienced a particularly horrendous wave of terrorism during February and March 1996 during Shimon Peres’s brief tenure as prime minister and defense minister after Rabin’s assassination. The killing of children in costumes, celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim in Tel Aviv was the cause of much Israeli rage. Hamas claimed the attacks were in retaliation for Israel’s liquidation of their master bomb maker, Yehia Ayache. These were the first of the suicide bombings, which were to become the archetypical terrorist attack of the years to come.

This morning, when I woke up my eleven-year-old son, he asked, “Has today’s terrorist attack already happened?” My son is scared, as are most of Israel’s citizens — during the last two weeks there have been five suicide bombings, in which more than fifty Israelis were killed and hundreds wounded. We have seen horrifying scenes of civilian slaughter of a kind we did not see in our worst wars. People have been crying out: How long will this go on? What kind of peace is this? Even Israelis who have supported the peace process so far have begun losing confidence in it, and the public opinion polls show a sharp rise in support for the political parties of the right, PERES, PERES, taunted the signs at a right-wing demonstration after the attacks, is THIS WHAT YOUR NEW MIDDLE EAST LOOKS LIKE?

True, the vision and idea seem impotent when faced with the stench of scorched flesh and the spilt blood. Fear overwhelms all other thoughts — when you walk down the street, you examine everyone you see seven times over. Any one of them might be your murderer (and, surprisingly, you discover that almost every single person — even familiar ones — appears sinister in some way). Every decision is liable to be a fateful one. Should I stop for a drink at this stand, or wait to get to the next one? Should I send my two children to school on the same bus? (And then there’s the decision over which child to send on the 7:10 and which child on the following bus.) I find myself walking down the main street where I have walked since childhood, the bustling, raucous, somewhat provincial main street of Jerusalem, with my mind ceaselessly smashing this beloved scene into little bits. I keep bidding the familiar farewell. Its impermanence elicits my compassion. Everything is so fragile — the body, routine, family, the fabric of life.

We Israelis are accustomed to living in the vicinity of death. I’ll never forget how a young couple once told me about their plans for the future: they’d get married and have three children. Not two, but three. Because if one dies, there will still be two left. This heart-wrenching way of thinking is not foreign to me. It’s the product of the unbearable lightness of death that prevails here, a way of seeing things that, in my opinion, is also characteristic of the long-suffering Palestinians. It’s precisely the disease that Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat sought to cure by turning onto the road of peace. Hamas’s suicide bombers want to keep the disease alive, and volunteer to spread it. Once, years ago, they hijacked airplanes; today they wish to hijack our future.

It is depressing to think that we are conducting a dialogue of peace with people who have among them spiritual-religious shepherds who enthusiastically send young people to their deaths in order to kill Jews. I cannot comprehend exactly what kind of God these people worship. What God can be proud that His people slaughter little children on their way to a holiday party?

It’s also depressing to see that, until now, we hear almost no Palestinian voices condemning these acts of mass murder. Where are you, Palestinian intellectuals who should be denouncing this? Where are the writers, where are the humanists? Don’t you understand that this is no longer just Israel’s war? After all, Hamas will want to impose its fanatic worldview on you moderate, secular people as well.

Tempers are high in Israel. People are demanding revenge and the annulment of the entire peace process. But even in this difficult hour, we must remember that this is the one way open to us if we want to live. We’ve already tried the alternative route, the one opposed to peace, for decades, and we still bear its physical and spiritual scars. The peace process will be long and painful, and apparently not all of us will survive it, but there are no quick solutions to such a complex and lengthy conflict. Israel and the moderate Palestinians help each other all along the way, because peace is the only state that can ensure that at least our grandchildren — I no longer believe that it will apply to our children — will be able to live a life of security, of normalcy, of blessed routine. A life in which young couples will want to have three children, maybe more, simply because it is a joy to raise them.